In Paris, the café chairs face the street, not each other — all the better for watching the city slip into evening.
Parisians have a name for the golden stretch between work and dinner: l'apéro. It's less an hour than a state of mind — a glass of something cold and a small plate of something salty, taken slowly on a café terrace with the chairs turned outward toward the pavement, because in Paris the street is the entertainment.
Come 5 o'clock, the zinc bars of the Marais and Saint-Germain hum with the after-work crowd. Someone orders a kir, someone a glass of chilled Sancerre, someone a cloudy pastis if the weather's warm. Nobody is in a hurry. The whole point of the apéritif is that it refuses to be rushed.
It's the civilized overture to a long French evening — and, thanks to the way the world turns, it's happening in Paris right about the time the workday ends across half of Europe.
Kir (or a glass of Bordeaux)
The quintessential Parisian apéritif — crème de cassis topped with cool white wine. Simple, elegant, and unmistakably French.
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